Mass MoCA is now the largest contemporary art museum in the country, and one of the largest on the planet. Artists from across the U.S. and the world have come to show their work in a former mill North Adams along the Hoosic River.
READ MOREWe have the intelligence of a city in the open air. Look closely and you’ll feel it. International artists keep studios on back roads, and one of the largest contemporary art museums in the world lives in a maze of an old mill. Contemporary art meets the past here, in fields from digital imaging to outdoor sculpture in the meadow grass.
We have museums with global followings. Sol LeWitt’s vivid color brightens the brick walls at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Impressionists gather at the Clark Art Institute, and visitors sit the reflecting pool. Illustrators surround Norman Rockwell’s studio.
Artists create new work, and conservitors restore work centuries old. A painter and printmaker from Botswana shows wall-sized canvases in a college museum, basking deep in afternoon sunlight.
Visitors take in the bright color of Sol Lewitt's murals at Mass MoCA.
In his Democratic Intuition project at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2017, Meleko Mokgosi, Williams ’07, investigates contradictions in democracy.
A conservator at work in the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in the Clark's Lunder Center at Stone Hill.
Visitors sit in the sun by the reflecting pool designed by Tadao Ando at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.
The Norman Rockwell Museum presents the artist's work and other illustrators.
Cy Gavin's night painting of Bish Bash Falls glows in Lure of the Dark at Mass MoCA.
Art Museums in the Berkshires
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Berkshire Botanical Garden
Stockbridge, MA
In a quiet corner of Stockbridge, the Berkshire Botanical Garden has cared for 20 acres of land since 1934. The gardens open to visitors from May to early October, with art exhibits, talks and events, classes and workshops year-round.
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The Mount
Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, wrote many of her best-known novels in this house, in the 10 years she lived in Lenox — from The House of Mirth to Ethan Frome. Her house is now a museum, a center of writing, music and performance, landscape and gardens, dedicated to keeping her spirit alive.
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The Foundry
West Stockbridge, MA
The Foundry in West Stockbridge is a new center for performing and visual arts, with a flexible gallery space and a black box theater for staged readings and open mics.
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Norad Mill
North Adams, MA
Moresi & Associates has drawn more than 40 local businesses to the renovated Norad Mill — artists and artisans, coffee and local wines, vintage records, yarn shops and even rocks and minerals.
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Chesterwood
In a studio with tall windows letting in the north light, Daniel Chester French created the figure of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Today contemporary sculpture lines the paths and gardens in the summer and fall.
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Bennington Museum
Bennington, VT
The Bennington Museum holds the largest collection of Grandma Moses’ paintings in the world — and shows them a few feet from the abstract Color Field artists who gravitated to Bennington College in the 1960s. And the museum argues they have more in common than you think.
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Frelinghuysen Morris
George L.K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen collected Modernists when the artists were living and barely known. New York artists themselves, they took an early lead in the Modernist movement in America. This art deco house in Lenox was their summer home and studio, and it preserves their collection and their artwork.
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Field Farm
Williamstown, MA
Nature and Modern art mingle at Field Farm in Williamstown. The Trustees of Reservations maintains the outoor sculpture garden and trails— open to the public from sunrise to sunset all year — and runs the house as a Bed and Breakfast, and they will open the Folly for art tours occasionally through the summer and fall.
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Sohn Fine Art
Lenox, MA
Photographer Cassandra Sohn founded Sohn Fine Art 2011, focusing on contemporary photography and unconventional mediums.
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Forge Project
Taghkanic, NY
A new collaboration celebrates Native and Indigenous communities across the Americas and builds relationships through the land and local food, arts and conversations, activism and more.
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Hilltown6 ceramics
Nine local potters in the hills and back roads on the eastern rim of the Berkshires have gathered together into a team earning national recognition — on the last weekend in July, they open their studios and kilns to the public for the annual Hilltown6 Pottery Tour.
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Berkshire Museum
Pittsfield, MA
The Berkshire Museum covers a lot of ground — local history and natural history, science and art. It has stood at the center of the county for more than 100 years.
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Hyde Collection
Glens Falls, NY
This small art museum founded by Louis and Charlotte Hyde holds exhibits around a the core collection, from the Renaissance to contemporary art.
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Clay Cottage Pottery
Richmond, MA
Donna Bernstein and Julie Buyon make handmade pottery at the Clay Cottage Pottery Gallery, with occasional pottery wheel demonstrations and Raku firings.
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Southern Vermont Arts Center
Manchester, VT
Vermont artists have been creating work together in Manchester for a hundred years, and the Southern Vermont Arts Center has been at the center of it for decades.
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Williams College
Williamstown, MA
Williams College is named the top liberal arts college in the country, out in the Berkshire hills with an art museum, theater and music, talks and trails — and a spirit of making its own fun.
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Asparagus Valley pottery
Shelburne Falls, MA
The Asparagus Valley Pottery Trail gathers artists in the hilltowns every spring for an annual studio tour, online and in-person.
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Berkshire Art Center
Stockbridge, MA
Berkshire Art Center has been teaching hands-on art since 1991, in stockbridge and Pittsfield and across the county.
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Berkshire Pottery Tour
Stockbridge, MA
The Berkshire Pottery Tour returns annually in September with a self-guided motor tour of five working pottery studios around the southern Berkshires.
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Marble House
Dorset, VT
Music and dance, fiction and nonfiction, patterns made of flower petals and colored sand … new work takes shape at the Marble House artist residencies.
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Salem Art Works
Salem, NY
Glass studio, foundry, ceramics workshop — Salem Art Works offers maker spaces for many kinds of art and craft — and many of them involve fire.
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Paradise City
Three County Fairground in Northampton, just east of the Berkshires, turns on like a lighted stage for artists from around New England, and some from around the country, at the Paradise City Arts Festival.
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